An inside look at the CAD, CAM and CAE industry - by Roopinder Tara

November 12, 2018

Nov 12, 2018--Engineering.com, the largest online publication for engineers, is pleased to announce the addition of Jeffrey Rowe. Jeff, a CAD, CAM and CAE industry veteran will lead engineering.com Design Software and Simulation sections.

“We are delighted to have Jeff to our team,” says Roopinder Tara, engineering.com’s Director of Content.”Our team now has a combined total of 80 years covering the engineering, architectural and manufacturing software industry and its application.”

About Jeff

Jeffrey Rowe has more than 40 years of experience in industrial design, mechanical engineering, and manufacturing.

He has written over 2,000 articles for CAD, CAM, CAE, and other technical publications, as well as consulting in many capacities in the product development community.

As a subject leader for Engineering.com, Jeff brings extensive hands-on experience with many design and production software products, and bases his commentary on this experience with the products and services he evaluates, and not baseless marketing hype.

About engineering.com

Engineering.com believes engineering is the most important profession in the world. Our team of writers, editors, videographers and industry analysts deliver engaging stories that are designed to inspire engineers to push the boundaries of innovation.

November 05, 2018

Generative design, for readers who may be emerging from an extended sleep, is the algorithmic, iterative attempt to produce shapes given nothing but design constraints. It is all the rage in CAD circles. Its champions call it the biggest change in CAD since… CAD, itself. They insist that it is—or soon will be—the way design is done, with computers and software finally rising to their full potentials, able to design, not just model. Its critics look at GD as they would a thousand monkeys banging away on typewriters and the unlikely chance that one would produce something remotely literary.

One of these fell as is bound to write a better article than this one. Critics of generative design give monkeys a better chance of writing a Shakespeare play, a sonnet, or even a verse, than of making a useful design.

At ASSESS 2018, one presenter after another reveals a version of GD. Several GD vendors are in attendance. As a group, they form a big set of newcomers to the fledgling conference. This is only the 3rd year of the Analysis, Simulation and Systems Engineering Software Strategies, which exists to advance the cause and broader acceptance of FEA and CFD, the mainstays of simulation. GD does not present as simulation because its computational methods are out of sight. Its solution is under the hood.

With the amount of attention being paid to the newcomers, there are more than a few attendees feeling like they are old news.

Generative Challenges

Generative design and topology optimization was theory spawned in another century and, for years, it was kept in the lab, the subject of research and the stuff of theses. It took too much power, its number-crunching so intense, only universities with mainframes and supercomputers could use it. The recent advances in PCs and GPUs have allowed a few generative design shapes to emerge from the lab. Hardware is now fast enough to handle the number of iterations GD needs to run through. However, its use as a design is still questionable. So far, we have seen a few experiments, either whimsical in form like artwork or odd, stringy shapes that look like they’ve been stretched apart like taffy. They invariably come with descriptions of how much weight they save—a most impressive weight savings, in fact, like 50 percent or more. As if that compensates for looking weird.

We hear promises that GD will tame its shapes, try to make shapes more like those prismatic shapes, easily mathematically rendered and easily machined. For now, most GD-produced shapes are so irregular that they can only be represented with triangular meshes or STL files. (Autodesk Fusion 360 goes an extra step to create geometry with “T-splines.”)

Beneath the Surface

The complexity of shape increases with internal structures, such as lattices or cellular structures. A solid part can be made much lighter—and while looking the same and preserving most of its strength—by hollowing it out. But such internal structures add so many features to the 3D model that CAD programs quickly give up. It’s hard to store the irregular geometry. It’s also hard to display the detail on the screen. A small part with an internal cell structure of your femur could have as much detail as the airplane that flew you to the conference.

Nature has had much more experience, heard at ASSESS. This section of human femur shows an irregular, space-filling structure, just about impossible for CAD to model and CAE to solve. (Picture courtesy of ASBMR Bone Curriculum.)

If modeling topology-optimized and generatively-designed shapes is difficult, the simulation of GD parts with internal structures is impossible. Modeling each little leg of a lattice or each wall of a cell, either with beam elements or thin shell elements respectively, begs for compute and storage resources that are out of this world. Think of simulating the weather by modeling air molecules.

The answer at the moment for simulation for irregularities, external or internal, maybe in being able to approximate the internal structure with a somewhat equivalent solid structure. That’s tricky. There could be equivalent mechanical properties for one type of loading or environment and not for another. It is a field of study known as “multiscaling,” with its own champions suggesting they have it all figured out. They don’t. Multiscaling become difficult as the internal composition varies, as it does in nature.*

“Nature has had much more experience,” says an ASSESS attendee.

*In all fairness, one vendor (nTopolgy) does claim to be able to solve gradually varying internal structures but a demo was not available in time for this article.

October 31, 2018

he billion dollar decision as to where Amazon will build its "2nd headquarters' has been the subject of much speculation and consternation. But if you want to know something big is going to happen, you listen to architects and engineers. So says my Uber driver as he takes me from Atlanta-Hartsfield airport to Braselton after he finds out what I do for a living. It's an hour ride and we have lots of time to talk.

He is convinced Amazon will be building their 2nd headquarters in Atlanta. Amazonians are buying property, renting apartments and lining up private schools for their kids, he says.

Schools for their kids?? That was how people knew LeBron was coming to LA. My Uber driver may have delivered.

Later, as I leave a restaurant in Braselton, I notice one table full of guys. A couple of them have shirts with Amazon logos.

Atlanta does make indeed make sense on several levels. It is major airline hub so the first part of the trip to HQ2 will an easy non-stop flight from the West Coast. But the rest of the trip may take just as long. As I sit in traffic (Atlanta's beltways are said to be as clogged as Washington DC's) I wonder if traffic congestion has been taken into account. Amazonians in the suburbs going to downtown offices are going to have a hell of a time.

October 30, 2018

At Bricsys’ annual reseller event, which recently concluded in London and was attended by a few hundred, the expectation was to learn about the recent enhancements of BricsCAD. But, the biggest news came from a Hexagon VP, which surprised everyone by revealing that the company had been bought.

Bricsys, a smaller CAD player with big ambitions, may have sought an acquisition after futile attempts at global market expansion. Co-founder and CEO Erik De Keyser, probably hoarse from expounding advantages of BricsCAD over AutoCAD year after year, had done everything right. He had created a CAD product that combined a parity in functionality and offered it a discount price. It was a strategy lifted straight from Autodesk’s old playbook, which it used in the 80s to achieve global domination. It worked a few years later when SolidWorks displaced PTC as the MCAD leader. But, Autodesk’s user base was proving to be intractable. Why on Earth would it not work again?

Entrenched CAD user bases are like the Earth’s tectonic plates. They stay mostly intact as they move, grinding at each other and making upheavals and havoc locally. For the big picture, does it matter?

The Belgium-based Bricsys cites its leadership near home. “We’re big in Benelux,” said Don Strimbu, head of communications and perhaps the company’s lone U.S employee. The company also has some small success in Asian countries, but Bricsys goes largely unnoticed in North America and most of the world.

Bricsys leadership and strength comes almost completely from De Keyser, who helped start Bricsys in 2002. It will be hard to imagine Bricsys without him. No one has emerged as an ascender to the throne.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he reassured the dozen or so press flown in for the occasion, many of whom who may have thought their European vacations were about to end. Hexagon had not been so generous flying journalists around. De Keyser, whose career started as an architect 41 years ago, did not say how long he was planning to stick around.

Terms of the deal were not announced. Public corporations like Hexagon do not have to disclose acquisition costs unless they are “significant,” usually seen as 5 percent of overall revenue. This means any acquisition below $170 million need not be detailed. The news came with a measure of Bricsys revenue: EUR€13 million in 2017. If De Keyser was able to get two times the revenue, the Bricsys acquisition would cost Hexagon about $30 million.

Similar Deals

Hexagon AB, headquartered in Sweden, makes over $3.5 billion in revenue per year. The company, best known for its measurement hardware—surveying and metrology—would now like to be seen as “a global leader in digital solutions.” It has been bolstering its software portfolio, even if it means going away from its core interests and industries. It came as surprise that it would buy MSC Software in 2017, best known for servicing aerospace with simulation software (NASTRAN). It may just have been a bargain. MSC had been losing ground to market leader ANSYS for years. Still, Hexagon paid $834 million, its second biggest acquisition ever. Its biggest acquisition was in 2010, when it paid a whopping $2.1 billion for Intergraph, best known for its piping and process and ship CAD and GIS software.

We are also reminded of other cross-market CAD, CAM and CAE acquisitions.

2000: Microsoft paid over $1billion for Visio, only to lose it in a vast portfolio of products.

2006: Google acquired the very popular SketchUp but decided it wasn’t relevant to its core.

2015: 3D Systems, additive manufacturer, bought Cimatron for subtractive manufacturing, as if to complete the picture.

“Entering into the U.S. market showed us we needed a bigger presence,” said De Keyser, who is hoping superior sales and marketing by Hexagon will make all the difference in opening up the American market. Hexagon, while headquartered in Sweden, does a substantial amount business in the U.S.

After evaluating the whole list of deals above and their effect, one has to wonder which, if any, company has increased the market share or user base of the CAD, CAM or CAE products they have acquired.

October 10, 2018

COMSOL fills the room. The company’s annual North America conference packs in between 200 to 300 people in Newton, Mass., near Boston. COMSOL holds regional conferences around the world, including one in Bangalore in August. Upcoming conferences will be in Switzerland, Shanghai, Taiwan, Seoul and Tokyo. Conspicuously absent is COMSOL’s birthplace and global HQ, Stockholm, Sweden.

If ever there was a technologically gifted company that needed a sales and marketing boost, it would be COMSOL.

I’m in Boston—again—this time by invitation from COMSOL to attend my first COMSOL user conference. The night before, I had dinner with a Boston-based friend and mentioned the reason I was in town.

“COMSOL who?” he asked. Bostonians are not known for their subtlety. My friend’s whole career has been around design and engineering software.

“COMSOL… They do simulation,” I said. “They have an office nearby [Burlington], and they’ve had their annual conference down the street [Newton] for a couple of years.”

COMSOL CEO Svante Littmarck addresses the multi-discipliniary crowd of mostly engineers but also physicists and chemists. The big news was the COMSOL Compiler and v5.4.

Nope, not ringing any bells. Clearly he has some marketing work to do. Despite a force in the U.S. now equal to its original office in Stockholm, Sweden, and moving its CEO to America, it still lags far behind industry juggernaut ANSYS in revenue, seats and all-around impact and visibility. Both companies do Multiphysics, the term for applying numerical methods to solve a variety of 2D and 3D field problems, from the way molecules behave in a nuclear collider, to blood cells in an artificial heart and to space capsules re-entering Earth’s orbit—physics, chemistry, magnetics, stress, electrodynamics and so on.

Seriously, what can’t COMSOL solve?

“We don’t do crash analysis,” said Bjorn Sjodin, vice president of Product Development, conceding only one discipline to ANSYS.

Otherwise, COMSOL holds its own. ANSYS may be the first simulation company to broach a billion dollars in revenue—they’ve been around longer, Bjorn said—but seem to be neck and neck in technical abilities and scope of solutions.

COMSOL’s advantage, according to Bjorn, is the integrations of solutions. You do fluid flow (CFD) and apply loads to your FEA seamlessly with fluid structure interaction (FSI). The acronyms are in common use in the presentations and hallways like they were common English. It is one interface, regardless of discipline, solution or numerical method, whether CFD, FEA or another. COMSOL is even looking at quantum mechanics to solve what happens at the nanometer scale (10-9m) when continuous fluid flow math gives way to particle collisions and avoidance.

By comparison, ANSYS, with its bigger market share and marketing department, has made itself a leader in Multiphysics. It has done so with acquisitions. Its multi-discipline solutions are used with different interfaces and data files, Bjorn said.

COMSOL seems determined to not give any ground technically to ANSYS. Its crack team of in-house content creators, led by Dr. Valerio Marra, may be the only marketing team to be led by a PhD in engineering. Valerio and his team detail the triumphs of many COMSOL customers to all the rest. It’s no wonder every version of COMSOL News, the glossy print publication the company takes great pains to produce, is the most technical of any in-house publication we’ve seen, bordering on academic journals.

October 04, 2018

John McEleney, co-founder of Onshape, shown here on a recent visit to Shanghai

John McEleney, co-founder of Onshape, ex-CEO of SolidWorks, is having a busy day. He’s been to the Develop3D conference for most of the day, where Onshape is a Bronze sponsor. He went home to read a story to his daughter. He meets me late in the evening for dinner at a Wellesley restaurant.

He is just getting started. John is planning to do more media outreach, the kind SolidWorks was known for in what may have been the Golden Age of media relations in the CAD industry. It was a time you would get a friendly call from a CEO, walk up and shake hands with John (McEleney) or Jon (Hirschtick) and talk like familiar acquaintances. They'd not only remember you be name, they’d be engaged, listening and actually seemed concerned about your work, your world, what you needed. We felt this way as media but we heard the same from resellers and users.

The media reach is back! "There are how many of you guys that matter? Ten? I'll take 5. Jon will take 5," says McEleney, over a chicken Parmesan.

John reviews for me the vital info, Onshape’s incredible 3 week release cycle, it’s advantage being database vs. files and drops hints of a big customer they are to announce. He fills me in his background, adventures at Raytheon, where he worked as a mechanical engineer, his time at Computervision, from where originators of SolidWorks (Scott Harris, Dave Corcoran) and PTC (Mike Payne) emerged. I hear of “1503” program (1 to 5 users, 0 to 3 months to close) which he created when he was in charge of the SolidWorks sales team.

CAD insiders remember John drawing of the "mainstream CAD" for us in in the 90s, singlehandedly making “mainstream CAD” a common term. True to form, he returns to pen and paper, to update the concept, but now with a few tidbits not yet public information. I am sworn to not reveal it.

We share the changes is software use, how youth has embraced it, the inertia of a legacy user base, the competition. McEleney, always the gentleman, talks respectfully and without disdain of competition, though he makes Onshape's advantages apparent.

August 27, 2018

Following quickly on the heels of an interview with Autodesk CEO (soon to appear in engineering.com), we read about Autodesk most recent quarter. Though Andrew Anagnost and I spoke for an hour, he did reveal any mention of what may be the company’s most hopeful result in recent memory. The company lost even less than usual, only $39 million, the least loss in over 2 years. While the profit is still negative, in the last two quarters, the company has lopped $135 million off its losses. The trajectory is clearly shooting towards positive!

Come to think of it, Andrew was in a pretty good mood.

(Picture courtesy of TenLinks)

Like peace, profits are always good. But the revenue curve looks even more consistent in its climb, now with 6 straight quarters of revenue growth.

(Picture courtesy of TenLinks)

Maybe the new CEO, with his new math and talk of ARR*, all meant to convince us that it was just a matter of time before deferred revenues would make up for what used to be collected at the onset of a software sale, like it did with old, perpetual license model… maybe there was something to all that.

From where we sit, there’s been no exodus of users away from Autodesk. So we should not be surprised. Maybe it is working exactly as promised, that the profit would again be come. It all depended on the users staying in the flock, all remaining would eventually see the light of term licensing and sign up, then we'd wait until that revenue, though coming in smaller chunks, would be realized.

A few did leave the flock but it was too few to matter. Many more have been vocal about their loss of perpetual license, the heart rending cries of users who thought their relationship would last forever, and then found out they had to pay forever, instead. But most of the flock has stayed intact.

How do we know the flock stayed intact? Any competition (all other CAD companies) would have touted those that joined. That never happened. No trumpet blowing, no doubling of user bases, no big architecture or construction firm announcing they were done with Autodesk and moving to another software platform. Even when other design software vendors held out perpetual license as a lure, an option they still had for their software. Their users still had a choice, they said, not like big, bad Autodesk. The lure was not taken. Not often enough. Certainly nothing to crow about.

August 22, 2018

Scott Borduin, acting CTO of Autodesk, after the departure of Jeff Kowalski, was told yesterday (August 21, 2018) that the position is his for keeps. Scott was previously CTO of Autodesk until 2005, under Carol Bartz. Jeff took over the role of CTO in 2006, according to his corporate bio.

Scott is based in Autodesk’s Portland office. More to come about Scott in his new old position after our interview (soon).

From Autodesk:

Scott has an MS in mechanical engineering and has worked in the CAD/CAM industry since 1984. Scott joined Autodesk in 1993 as part of the Woodbourne, Inc acquisition, and was subsequently chief architect on Inventor. Scott became Autodesk CTO in 1999 and held that position until 2005 when he left to join the non-profit world. He returned to Autodesk in 2012 and has held several senior technology leadership positions since then.

June 27, 2018

How shrewd is Jim Heppelmann? He has sold a minority stake of PTC—about 9%—to Rockwell for a billion dollars. By contrast, Tony Affuso, CEO of UGS, makers of NX and Teamcenter, had to give up his entire company—100 percent—to Siemens for $3.5 billion in 2007. In other words, while Affuso got about 3 times the revenue for UGS, Heppelmann got almost 10X the revenue for PTC per equity dollar.

But after the Rockwell deal, PTC is still Heppelmann’s to run.

“At around nine percent ownership, Rockwell does not control PTC, nor [does it] have the ability to block or force any strategic moves that PTC might consider down the road,” Heppelmann stated in an article in engineering.com.

Why is Heppelmann smiling? CEO of PTC, Jim Heppleman (right) on stage at PTC’s LiveWorx recently concluded in Boston, announcing a sweet deal for PTC. He got a billion dollars from Rockwell, while retaining almost total control of his company. (Image courtesy of engineering.com.)

Shares of PTC shot up 10 percent after the announcement as investors saw a definite value in the partnership with Rockwell. Rockwell shares, if they moved at all, went down a bit.

It used to be that industrial companies sought to rid themselves of their homegrown CAD software. Dassault Systèmes spun out to Dassault Aviation. McDonnell Douglas spun off Unigraphics (UGS). Now that UGS was acquired by Siemens and Rockwell bought a stake in PTC, are we to believe that the pendulum swings the other way, that CAD companies are all to go back to being part of industrial businesses?

Rockwell is a Fortune 500 company, with annual sales of $6.3 billion. As big as that sounds, Siemens AG is far bigger, an order of magnitude bigger, annual sales of almost a $100 billion.

Rockwell will buy the 9% equity with a $1 billion in cash. PTC will use the cash to buy back stock, preventing dilution for existing stockholders. The deal is subject to regulatory approval. .

In many ways, the Rockwell deal validates PTC's path toward emerging technologies. Historically, PTC has been seen by CAD insiders as chasing business far from their core competency (CAD). First there was PLM (Windchill), then Mathcad , desktop publishing, more... CAD was never enough for PTC, it seemed. The latest of “Heppelmann’s latest new, shiny objects,” as one analyst put it, were augmented reality(AR) and Internet-of-Things (IoT). PTCs announcements of acquisitions in AR an IoT sent some of us Googling what those terms meant—and questioning the merits of one deal after another.

Heppelmann didn’t need us to validate his visions. Not with companies like Rockwell willing to buy a stake in the technologies PTC was able to establish leadership in. The Rockwell money is redemption for the PTC leader. Heppelmann inherited a company that was a tired, old, two-trick pony. One trick was the venerable Pro/ENGINEER, reincarnated as Creo. It had little hope of regaining its number one spot solidly (pun intended) by SolidWorks. The second trick was Windchill, a PLM product whose biggest benefit may have been the incorporation of Jim Heppelmann, Windchill’s founder, into the PTC fold.

Rockwell Inevitable only in Retrospect

Everyone was caught flatfooted by the Rockwell deal. There was smart money on GE buying PTC. After all, both companies were singing an IoT tune. GE was like Siemens AG in the United States and represented a too-easy parallel to the Siemens/UGS acquisition. But GE has been busy imploding. From the height of Jack Welch leadership, it had seen its global empire crumble, divisions sold off and its share price become a shadow of its former self and all followed by talk of going back to its core businesses. It was certainly not a climate for expanding into CAD and PLM.

Rockwell, much smaller than GE at its prime, may have been far down the list in terms of acquisition or investment but seems like they were hungering for exactly what PTC was cooking. Rockwell paid almost 9% more than PTC stock was selling for.

June 06, 2018

Most CAD insiders know Brenda Discher from Autodesk, where she was involved with launching one mechanical design product after another, starting with Mechanical Desktop, then Inventor and most recently Fusion 360.

Discher recently made news for leaving Autodesk, where she had been for 23 years, and joining Siemens PLM. It’s a big step up for her. Siemens PLM has revenue of $4.5 billion and 19,000 people, both twice as much as Autodesk. The parent company, Siemens AG has 370,000 employees.

We caught up to her on her 44th day at Siemens PLM. Discher had just returned from her “world tour,” executive retreat in Barcelona and Hannover-Messe, the world’s biggest trade fair, in Germany. She had been meeting many who she’ll be working with, and for, in her new role as senior vice president of Marketing and Strategy. She will be unifying products and messages for products in Siemens’ enterprise design, engineering and manufacturing portfolio, which recently added Mentor Graphics.

Discher joins a long list of veterans leaving Autodesk, including Lynn Allen, Carl Bass, Noah Cole, Amar Hanspal, Clay Helm, Heidi Hewitt, Jay Tedeschi and Joseph Wurcher, to name just a few. She doesn’t attribute leaving Autodesk to anything that happened at Autodesk, though. It’s more about opportunity at Siemens and a chance to head up the marketing effort of a large multi-national company.

An unscientific comparison of executives from engineering software firms convinced me that years of experience are seen as a positive in foreign companies. Is it possible they value the knowledge and wisdom that comes with experience? Bay Area companies, by comparison, are more likely to be impressed by youth.

Asked about the differences in corporate culture, Discher has found the people at Siemens quite welcoming. Siemens places a great value on relationships with enterprise customers.

“The enterprise selling at Siemens is best in class,” she said.

Mentor figures big in Siemens’ plans, and Discher will be doing a lot of work on Mentor’s messaging and the integration of Mentor products with the Siemens portfolio. This will often take her to Mentor’s Oregon offices. She had transplanted herself to Oregon to work with Autodesk’s manufacturing team in Lake Oswego. She was resisting moving to San Francisco to be closer to where most of Autodesk management works.

Her heart always has been in Michigan. The change to Siemens has given her a chance to find a home base again. Although head of Siemens PLM is listed in Plano, Texas, most of the executives now work in the Livonia office, Discher said.